Book Review: Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment

Books/Reading Add comments
Sep 102009

Title:   Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchenjulie-and-julia

Author: Julie Powell

Publication Information: Little, Brown and Company (September 28, 2005), 320 pps.

Genre: Biography/Memoir/Cooking Essays

Explanation/Summary:

From the back cover:

With the humor of Bridget Jones and the vitality of Augusten Burroughs, Julie Powell recounts how she conquered every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and saved her soul.

Julie Powell is 30-years-old, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a soul-sucking secretarial job that’s going nowhere. She needs something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged assignment. She will take her mother’s dog-eared copy of Julia Child’s 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she will cook all 524 recipes. In the span of one year.

At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from the simple Potage Parmentier (potato soup) into the more complicated realm of aspics and cr�epes, she realizes there’s more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the eye. With Julia’s stern warble always in her ear, Julie haunts the local butcher, buying kidneys and sweetbreads. She sends her husband on late-night runs for yet more butter and rarely serves dinner before midnight. She discovers how to mold the perfect Orange Bavarian, the trick to extracting marrow from bone, and the intense pleasure of eating liver.

And somewhere along the line she realizes she has turned her kitchen into a miracle of creation and cuisine. She has eclipsed her life’s ordinariness through spectacular humor, hysteria, and perseverance.

Analysis and Evaluation:

  • Did the author achieve his or her purpose?
    Yes, I believe Powell communicated her story.
  • Is the writing effective, powerful, difficult, beautiful? The book is based on Julie’s blogging experience of cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in the period of one year.   What might have been just fine for a blog, did not translate well to book form.   I found the writing to be quite vulgar, somewhat humorous, and always self-absorbed.
  • What are the strengths and weaknesses of the book? The strength is the concept of cooking every recipe in “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” within the period of a year.   The idea of that, I think, is pretty neat.
    The weakness is that Julie comes across like a self-absorbed, foul-mouthed, whiney brat.   And, considering this is a biography/memoir maybe she is, but I don’t like meeting the “enough-about-you-let’s-talk-about-me” kind of people in real life, I really don’t want to spend my leisure/reading time with them…
    The foul language was really unnecessary, and there was a LOT of it.
  • What is your overall response to the book? Did you find it interesting, moving, dull? I was really disappointed with this book.   I wanted it to have more Julia, less Julie.   I wanted to like Julie, but at the end of the day, I really couldn’t stand her.
  • Would you recommend it to others? Not really.
    • Grade: D

    Other Notes: I found out from my dad the other day that the movie “Julie & Julia” is partially based on this book, but it is also partially based on Julia Child’s book “My Life in France.”   Now that I know the movie isn’t just based on Julie Powell’s book, I’m more inclined to go see it.
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    Posted by TexasTanya at 10:50 pm

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